Commonwealth AI.
Industries IND.02

Government & Civic

Public-sector infrastructure that holds up under FOIA.

Municipal departments, public authorities, civic nonprofits, and the agencies that serve them. We build the boring, durable plumbing — records-compliant, audit-traceable, vendor-neutral — that makes the rest of the work possible.

Book a Procurement-friendly Intro 30 min · If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you who is.
Fit check
  • A department, division, or agency of 10 to 200 staff with one or more legacy systems nobody loves and nobody can replace
  • Workflows pass through public-records review, procurement, council or commission approval — and at least one of those steps is still paper
  • Funded but underbuilt — the budget exists, the operational capacity to use it does not
  • A director or deputy who can name the bottleneck in one sentence and has a procurement process that allows a paid pilot
The Pattern

We’ve seen this stack before.

P.01 Symptom

Constituent intake is a queue with a person in front.

Service requests, applications, complaints, and FOIA requests come in by web form, email, phone, and walk-in. They get logged in a system, sometimes. They get routed to a department, eventually. The person on the front desk is the integration. When that person is out, the queue stops.

P.02 Symptom

Senior people are doing junior work.

A division director writes the council memo because the template is old. A deputy summarizes the public-comment file because nobody else has time. The grant writer reformats line items at 9pm because the procurement system rejects three-decimal numbers.

P.03 Symptom

The metrics are estimates.

Permits processed, response times, case backlogs, cost per service — the numbers exist somewhere, in two systems that disagree, and the reports get assembled by hand the week before the council meeting. Annual reporting is a project, not a query.

P.04 Symptom

The systems were bought ten years ago.

The PMS the department runs on hasn’t had a real product update since 2014. The vendor wants to sell a "modernization" the budget cycle won’t support. Meanwhile the work goes on. The civic infrastructure is the staff working around the software, not the software itself.

Stack

Tools we know inside out.

We’ve shipped against all of these in production. If yours isn’t listed, we’ll be honest about ramp time on the audit call.

Permits & cases

Accela, Tyler, OpenGov, GovQA, NextRequest

GIS & assets

Esri ArcGIS, Cityworks, Cartegraph

Comms

Outlook, Gmail, Granicus, GovDelivery

Finance

Tyler Munis, Workday, QuickBooks Online, Plaid

AI core

Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, self-hosted Llama

Automation

Make.com, n8n, Supabase, NocoDB

FAQ

What agencies ask us before they hire us.

Q.01 Will the records this system creates be FOIA-defensible and discoverable?
Yes, by design. Every model draft, every workflow execution, and every approval is logged with the user, the timestamp, the input, and the output. The logs sit in a database your records officer can query. We've drafted retention policy language with municipal counsel and built export procedures for FOIA-responsive requests. If a citizen requests 'every AI-generated draft about parking enforcement in 2025,' you can answer the request in an afternoon, not a quarter.
Q.02 What about CJIS, HIPAA, or sensitive constituent data?
We deploy private and self-hosted models when the data class requires it — Llama 3 or Qwen on your infrastructure, with no traffic leaving your network. The relational layer can run on NocoDB on-prem. We work with your IT security team on the data flow diagram before any system is stood up. Where commercial models fit (most public-facing constituent comms, most internal drafting), we use enterprise terms with no-training agreements.
Q.03 How does this work with our procurement process?
We've sold to municipalities, public authorities, and 501(c)(3)s. Most of our public-sector engagements start with a 1- to 2-week paid pilot under a small purchase order, expand to a fixed-fee build under a sole-source justification or a competitive bid, and continue under a retainer. We've responded to RFPs and we've helped agencies write the spec for one. We don't bill against grant overhead caps we haven't agreed to in writing.
Q.04 How long until our backlog actually moves?
Three weeks for the first measurable shift, six for full deployment. By week three the highest-volume intake type — usually permit applications, FOIA requests, or 311 cases — is being classified, routed, and logged automatically. By week six the senior staff who were doing routing are back on substantive work.
Q.05 Will this replace civil-service positions?
No. We don't sell hidden workforce reductions. The hours we eliminate are the ones nobody hired anyone to do — re-keying intake, hand-summarizing meetings, manually reconciling grant expenditures. Public-sector clients have re-deployed staff to constituent-facing work, not laid them off. If your political reality requires a headcount story, tell us up front and we'll be straight about whether we can support it.
Next step IND.02.99

Tell us about the binder nobody reads.

The compliance binder, the hand-typed quarterly report, the grant reconciliation spreadsheet that takes a person two days a month. We’ll tell you what we’d automate first and what it would cost.